My Sanctum

As I have mentioned before, one of the things that saves me from severe winter blahs (aka Seasonal Affective Disorder) is my planning for the spring garden.

I should explain that my garden has rules: everything I plant in it should be, at least in part, edible*. This means that I landscape with edible flowers, herbs, and plants that have been gathered and eaten in American or other cultures. Most of these can’t be found in nurseries or are rather expensive if bought as plants, so I grow them from seed myself in my grow room.**

Here is a view of my grow room, which is a small basement room that used to be the coal room back when my 100-year-old house was a youngster:

Not very impressive, is it?

The wires are for all the fluorescent fixtures and the heat pads — and the ancient iPad repurposed for record keeping that you see at your left. The wall that you can’t see is lined with reflective material that was meant to insulate a garage door. Peel and stick — excellent for increasing the light in this room.

The flats you see are for two sets of items I’m growing — the edible nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and a handful of herbs (celery, lovage, yarrow, calamint, perilla, hyssop, alpine basil herb).

Closeup of my first herb flat

I have more to plant — I’m waiting on seeds for my moon garden and more herbs and for some flowers (and for lots of things that will get planted directly in the garden. By the time I’m done, I will have six to eight flats of seedlings to nurture.

Not all of them will survive. Past seedlings have succumbed to damping off disease (which I fight heroically with cinnamon water spray) and watering malfunctions. Some seeds never come up. On the other hand, sometimes they grow faster than I expected, which is why I’m setting the top shelf (that you don’t see) for taller seedlings to reside. I will save the best of the plants that come up for planting come spring.***

Spring comes to me sooner than to most because of my grow room, with its ugly cement floor and worn shelves. Today I sat with my seedlings, thinning them out so that they could grow strong, and feeling, if not happy, a bit less out-of-sorts.

* This year’s exception is the moon garden, which is comprised of white, night-scented flowers, most of which are toxic to deadly if eaten.

** When I say “grow room”, people think I’ve got one of these high-tech setups advertised on eBay where people grow — well, plants that are illegal to possess or use in this state. Mine is not nearly so exciting.

*** This doesn’t count the direct-seeded vegetables. I have to admit that I’m not as good with these because it gets too hot to weed and there are so many weeds. I’m working on using more mulching and earlier morning weeding.

Light

This time of year depresses me — literally — with its dark mornings and uniform bleakness of the terrain. It’s not the deep despair of my bipolar depression, but a constant sense of flatness, of anhedonia, of just wanting to stay in bed. The festivities of Christmas that buoyed up my spirits have long passed; all now is grey.

My psychiatrist has prescribed 1 hour a day in my grow room for light therapy. There’s plenty of light in the small basement room, supplied by eight fluorescent light fixtures. And, although it’s a small room, there’s a table and chair where I can sit and even an old iPad I use to maintain my plant records.

And then there’s the plants. Right now, I have starts of herbs like hyssop and calamint, celery leaf and Asian celery, and my tomatoes and peppers popping out of the ground. For the most part, they’re tiny seedlings with their seed leaves no bigger than a baby mouse’s ear. But they’re alive, and I almost believe I can feel the light of their lives brightening my day.

In the gloom of this season, I will take all the light I can get.

Making Peace with Winter

I’m definitely dealing with the winter blahs.

I’m not depressed-depressed, just feeling bleak. My life matches the outdoors — icy gray, devoid of new growth. I have no new ideas for writing right now, no inspirations, no breakthroughs in getting published.

I need to make peace with this winter. Do I always need to be productive, always striving toward something, always trying to make something blossom in my life? I don’t know; I feel best when I’ve just sent out queries, in love with the potential of my work being brought to a wider audience. I feel worst when I get a rejection — I got another one last night. Thus is the way of winter.

How does one weather winter? By sheltering oneself against the chill and waiting. Maybe this is what I need to do — take a break from writing, from editing, from sending out queries, from calling myself a writer. Maybe I need time to figure out how to reinvent myself again, as that’s been a big part of writing for me — trying to reinvent myself.

Maybe I will become something new come spring, when the ice melts and seeds come bursting out of their shells.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

The Winter Doldrums

I’m fighting the winter doldrums.

The polar vortex with its -40 F (-40 C) wind chill has passed, and the warmer temperatures have melted some of the snow, but we’re now shrouded in grey skies and thick fog. There is nothing romantic in February fog and muddied snow.

My life looks like the terrain outside — isolated and isolating, with no shiny stars left over from Christmas to focus on. No bad news, but no good news either. Nothing other than the occasional rejection on the query front. No new life in my basement grow room, although the good news is that I will be starting some seeds in a couple weeks — tomatoes and peppers and eggplant; white flowers for the moon garden (aka the non-edible portion of my garden).

It’s hard to feel optimistic right now. It’s hard to believe that beneath the snow and ice of my life, plants slumber waiting for their time to reach for the sky.

The Wind Chill

The temperature at this moment is -17 F (-22 C) with windchills of -32 F (-35.5 C). At this temperature, any exposed skin will develop frostbite in ten minutes. The US Postal Service suspends deliveries to save its workers from literally freezing to death and schools shut down. Outdoors could kill me today with very little effort, if I were to venture out and stay there.

I’m not sure why I got out of bed this morning. It’s hard even thinking about moving, even in a blessedly warm house, with temperatures outside like that. It’s bitterly cold outside, and my body wants to eat high-carb food, gain twenty pounds of fat, and hibernate for the winter.

I will do nothing of the sort. I have coffee to drink, blankets to swath myself in, books to edit. I have gardens to plan. I defy the chill, even though it frightens me with its potency outside.

I’m Not Feeling It

My writing life lately has been meh.

Current projects: finish re-re-re edit of Apocalypse (halfway done) so it can be dev edited. Add a couple thousand words to the dev edited Voyageurs so I can send it out for queries. Wait to see if any agents nibble on Prodigies (not good so far with rejections in the double digits). Flesh out idea for possible new novel, but I’m not feeling it.

That’s pretty much the problem today — I’m not feeling it. Whatever it is.

I have a Tarot deck, but it reads in terms of themes and affirmations rather than predictions. I don’t trust predictions, because it’s easy to insert wishful thinking and get disappointed. I read by shuffling the cards repeatedly and reading what falls out of the deck. My cards today: Hanged man (It’s not time yet; surrender your expectations) and Page of Earth (undeniable evidence that hard work will pay off). Which seems … contradictory.

Meh.

I suppose it could be the winter. It’s hard to get inspired when everything outside appears the same uniform shade of grey, and going outside means braving the cold (Wednesday’s windchills are predicted to be -40F/-40C) The earth is hibernating and so, it seems, is my brain.

So I’m looking for inspiration because I’m not feeling it. Anything you can send me for inspiration (honestly, I mean it — you can comment on posts!) would be appreciated.

Dreaming of Green Again

I’m starting to plan my summer garden. As anyone who gardens knows, this consists of getting glossy catalogs with beautiful and fascinating plants, ordering the seeds. planting them, and becoming disappointed that one’s results are not the same as in the catalogs. In my opinion, all catalogs should have “Your Results May Vary” in fine print next to the pictures.

I wish I had a warm greenhouse to spend the winter in. Instead, I have a magnificent grow room in the basement with shelves and fluorescent lights and heat pads. Not quite as nice as a greenhouse, but it’s mine. I sometimes worry that I’m going to have my tomato plants confiscated by DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency, for my foreign friends). I’ve already been visited by an agent of the USDA (US Department of Agriculture, for all my foreign friends), who confiscated some seeds I could have sworn were legal in the US.

I’m just beginning seed-starting season. It’s too early to start most seeds, but I have a few seeds with — well, advanced skill requirements, such as “Violets: warm stratify for 60-120 days, then cold stratify for two weeks, then plant.” I hope 60 days is enough warm stratifying, because I don’t want to have to wait till September to plant them. So the cold stratifying seeds (yucca, semi-wild rose) are in the refrigerator in dampened peat moss, the warm stratifying seeds are in the grow room, and I’m waiting a couple more weeks to plant my first seeds.

If past years are an indicator, I will have everything from abject failure to stunning success to “why the heck did I do that?” An example of the latter was the perilla that I planted in a 72-cell mini-trainer (which I will not use again, even though I’ve used them for years) –they got nine inches tall in a root ball that grew out the bottom of the one-tablespoon sized root pot, and all the roots tangled. So I had One big 72-stemmed perilla that lacked leaves on the bottom six inches of the stems and that I coiuldn’t get out of the pots. Note to self: You don’t need that much perilla. Also note to self: bigger start pots and transplanting sooner.

I’ll tell you more about the secret of my garden later.

Dreaming of a Garden

I dream of violets breaking through the earth,
presenting themselves with shy giggles,
and the ferns unfurling their fronds in stately parade,
Even the scruffy dandelions will come,
elbowing each other for room,
boldly declaring their rights under the sun.

For now, I must be satisfied with dreams
of introducing new lives in the garden —
rhubarb and greens and humble turnips all
slumbering in shells in cool, dry packages.

Winter’s Nap

I would just as soon sleep all winter.

I would have made a fine early agrarian — farm manically all summer, hibernate all winter. In a cave wouldn’t be bad as long as it was warm and comfortable — ok, fine, I’d have a hay mattress on the floor, infested by fleas and lice. I guess I’ll stop my romanticizing here.

It’s hard for me to get out of bed in the winter. My husband’s laughing at this because I’m always up and out of bed before he is, at 5:00 AM every morning. Honestly, though, it’s HARD to get out of bed. I keep hoping to be snowed out of work even though they shoveled all the snow from Sunday’s blizzard.

The world is no longer that simple as to follow the rhythms of the year. Academia, my home, follows a rhythm, which is why I love it. But winter is still worktime, and I fight the need to be cozy every day to go to work.

Christmas break will be here in two and a half weeks; I think I’ll make it till then.